Quick verdict: Pirots 5 sends ELK Studios' four-bird crew into a cursed Egyptian temple, layering the series' signature CollectR bird-and-gem mechanic with new traps, a coin game, and a proper multi-stage bonus round. It's dense — closer to a board game than a spin-and-forget slot — so it suits players who like reading a paytable before they play, more than anyone after something fast and simple.
The Story
ELK Studios frames Pirots 5 as a direct sequel to the crew's earlier adventures. After "conquering space" in a previous installment, the four birds return home victorious — only for their ship's skipper to crash-land into a theme park map, accidentally burning it. When the smoke clears, the wreckage reveals the location of the lost city of gold, and with it, the whereabouts of the series' recurring traitor, Captain Blackfeather. A voice at the temple entrance warns of his curse and the mummies lurking inside, but the birds go in anyway — straight into a temple full of traps, arrows, boulders, and shifting ground. It's a small but genuine bit of world-building that gives the mechanics below some narrative context, rather than just being reskinned symbols on a grid.
Theme, Gameplay & Symbols
The setting is a sand-swallowed temple full of traps and buried treasure, a clear tonal shift from the earlier Pirots entries' brighter island settings, and one that puts it in similar Egyptian-adventure territory to Play'n GO's Book of Dead, even if the underlying mechanics couldn't be more different. The base grid is 6 columns by 6 rows, and it can expand up to 8x8 as the round develops, opening up more space for the four parrots to work with.
Wins don't come from fixed paylines — ELK lists the "paylines" field for Pirots 5 simply as "CollectR," its own mechanic rather than a conventional payline count. Instead, the four birds fly around the grid collecting matching coloured gems. Gems come in four colours and multiple value tiers, so a single collecting run can escalate quickly once a bird locks onto a high-tier gem colour.
Presentation & Sound
ELK Studios' art direction is one of the more consistent draws across the whole Pirots series, and Pirots 5 keeps that up. The temple setting is rendered with a lot of small environmental detail — cracked stonework, torchlight, dust kicked up by the traps — that gives the grid a sense of place rather than feeling like a flat backdrop. Captain Blackfeather and the mummy enemies in the Catacombs are both animated with a fair amount of character, which matters given how often you'll see them once you're deep into a session. The soundtrack shifts noticeably between the calmer base game and the more intense bonus rounds, reinforcing when a big collecting run is actually building toward something rather than just being background noise.
How to Play Pirots 5
The rules take a minute to explain even though a single spin plays out quickly:
- Set your stake. Bets run from €0.20 up to €100 per spin (or the local currency equivalent).
- Spin the reels. The four birds fly around the 6x6 grid, and each one that lands on a gem collects it.
- Watch the grid react. Traps (arrow, boulder, secret door) can trigger, catacomb corners can pull a bird into a mummy battle, and the grid itself can expand up to 8x8 as the round develops.
- Build toward a bonus symbol. Collecting three bonus symbols triggers the Bonus round; if one of those three is a super bonus symbol, you get the higher-variance Super Bonus instead. Your grid size, collection progress, and any gem upgrades carry over into the bonus round rather than resetting.
- Or skip straight there with X-iter, where available. If you'd rather not wait for a natural trigger, ELK's X-iter menu lets you pay a multiple of your stake to jump directly into a chosen feature — this option is not available to UK players.
Features & Mechanics
This is where Pirots 5 asks for more attention than most slots. Every mechanic below is officially documented by ELK Studios rather than inferred from play, so the numbers are exact:
- Tokens: collectable tokens build up across spins and feed into the game's other systems rather than paying out immediately.
- Captain Blackfeather: a recurring character feature that can turn 1 to 4 birds into ghosts, transforming their symbols into Blackfeather gems for the rest of the round.
- Traps: three distinct trap types (arrow, boulder, secret door) sit on the grid and interact with the birds' movement — some help, some hinder. The secret door in particular rotates the entire grid, moving all symbols and birds at once, and adds cross-over floor tiles that let birds pass back over positions they've already collected.
- Catacombs: collecting a symbol on top of a catacomb corner sends a bird into the catacombs, where defeating a mummy in battle rewards a feature symbol.
- Cursed Temple Coin Game: a dedicated side-game that triggers when the entire grid is cleared during the secret door feature — separate from the main Bonus round.
- Bonus & Super Bonus: collecting three bonus symbols triggers the main Bonus round. If one of those three is a super bonus symbol, the higher-variance Super Bonus round triggers instead. Crucially, the grid size, collection meter progress, and any gem upgrades earned in the base game all carry over into the bonus round rather than resetting.
- X-iter: ELK's feature-buy menu, letting you pay directly to enter a specific feature instead of relying on the base game to trigger it. The five tiers are priced at 3x your stake for a Bonus Hunt, 10x for a Mega Hunt, 50x for a guaranteed Cursed Temple, 100x for the regular Bonus Game, and 250x for the Super Bonus Game. This is not available to UK players: the UK Gambling Commission's remote technical standards have prohibited bonus buy features at UKGC-licensed casinos since 2019, so no legally operating UK site can offer X-iter — the pricing above is included only for completeness on how the game is configured in other markets.
Volatility & Win Potential
ELK Studios rates Pirots 5's volatility at 7 out of 10 on its own internal scale — firmly in high-volatility territory, though not at the very top of it. The maximum win is 10,000x your stake, with a maximum exposure cap of €1,000,000 per bonus round. Hit frequency sits at 25.1%, meaning roughly one in four spins lands some kind of win, though the size of those wins varies enormously given the volatility rating.
RTP is published as a range rather than a single figure: 87.0% to 96.0%, depending on the operator and market you're playing in. That's a wider spread than many slots publish, so it's worth checking the in-game info screen at whichever casino you play at — you want to be as close to the 96% end of that range as possible. Stake sizes run from €0.20 up to €100 per spin (or the equivalent in other currencies), which is a fairly standard range for a slot at this volatility level.
Pros & Cons
- Pro: genuinely novel mechanic — CollectR doesn't play like a standard cluster-pays or Megaways slot.
- Pro: a lot of moving parts (traps, tokens, Blackfeather) without feeling cluttered once you've played a few rounds, a density of mechanics that puts it in similar company to Play'n GO's Reactoonz, another slot that packs an unusual amount into its base game.
- Pro: strong ceiling at 10,000x for a 7/10 volatility game, with bonus-round progress that persists rather than resetting.
- Con: the rules take real effort to learn — not a slot to jump into without reading the paytable first.
- Con: X-iter feature buys are not available to UK players under any circumstances — UKGC rules have prohibited bonus buy features since 2019, so this route into a feature doesn't exist on a UK-licensed site.
- Con: the published RTP range is unusually wide (87–96%) — worth checking which variant your casino actually runs.
Final Verdict
Pirots 5 is a confident, well-produced entry in one of the more distinctive slot series on the market right now. It won't appeal to players who want a straightforward spin-and-go game, but if you enjoyed the earlier Pirots titles — or you like a slot with genuine mechanical depth — this is one of the stronger releases of the year so far.
